Category Archives: Hall of Fame

Now I have finally completed the annual update of my ADC survey data. There’s a lot going on in the ADC field, so using scientific data only until March 2010 wasn’t going to be acceptable for much longer. Now the survey covers scientific ADC implementations reported all the way from 1974 until April/May 2011. Actually, I still have around 70 ADC papers from ESSCIRC 1975-1995 to read in order to make the survey backwards exhaustive, but those papers aren’t likely to change the content in this post. Therefore I’m not going to keep you waiting for this figure-of-merit status update any longer. Let’ get to the business:

Influence on state-of-the-art

With the current update, the survey data now covers 1550 unique scientific papers and we could expect some changes to the state-of-the-art registered by the ADC FOM-o-meter.

Standing Their ground

Not everything changes, though. Amazingly enough, the world record “Walden” or “ISSCC” FOM

Pushing the envelope

The same SAR implementation by van Elzakker, also used to hold the state-of-the art “Thermal FOM”

for Nyquist converters, but a new record (7.6 aJ) was set by Hurrell et al. with a pipelined SAR ADC reported in December 2010 [2]. Observant blog readers may wonder why this design wasn’t already listed as state-of-the-art, since it was originally reported at ISSCC 2010. The answer is that the peak performance that nudged the state-of-the-art was measured at a very low (50 kHz), and that data point was not reported in the ISSCC paper – possibly in the slides. Since I wasn’t at the conference, any information shared in the slides was not available to me. Either way, congratulations to Christopher Peter Hurrell, and the rest of the team from Analog Devices UK and Ireland for this excellent design!

Finally, the overall best reported by Pavan et al. [3], has been improved upon by a discrete-time DSM by Perez et al. [4] reporting a 2.7 aJ. Converter Passion is impressed by this significant contribution from Aldo Pena Perez and co-authors from University of Pavia, Italy. Congratulations!

Hall of fame

All changes are now registered on the Converter Passion ADC FOM-o-meter page – your one stop solution for monitoring the evolution of A/D-converter figures-of-merit – and you can still find the previous (and current) state-of-the-art in the newly opened Converter Passion Hall of Fame. [See the new top menu “Hall of Fame” for different halls.]

So, what do you think: Was this result to be expected, or did you find anything surprising in the update? What do you think is the best approach in order to finally beat the van Elzakker record and send it to the Hall of Fame? 😉 [Michiel and co-authors, you are obviously welcome to share your thoughts as well. Is your 4.4fJ record unbreakable?]

Just a short notice about the Converter Passion Hall of Fame that was opened here on the blog today. There are actually two separate halls at the moment – one for each of the two most commonly used ADC figures-of-merit – and may expand in the future. You’ll find them under the aptly named menu item “HALL OF FAME“.

There has also been some changes in the readout from the Converter Passion ADC FOM-o-meter, but I’ll tell you more about it in the next post, right after this one.